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2009-12-17

One server to rule them all

Ok so I had a rant today on another blog, I felt I wrote enough I should put it here in case I need to cut and paste it again next time I come accross someone who is ignorant of Java servers and the benefits available for a script agnostic approaach to server design.

Neil said: "Why on earth would you even consider using Railo et al to run your
code, when it could never be as good as your language/platform specific
setup you're using now."

1. From what I have read Quercus is
faster than the standard PHP engine and can do several things like db
obfuscation that the dll version doesn't do well. I've heard a lot
about how slow Ruby is so I had assumed that jRuby may also be faster (I have since checked and yes jRudy claims to be faster and more powerful).

2.
If I ran a hosting company and had the option to install languages
separately with all their different admins or settings or all at once
with a well thought out admin structure and a more powerful level of
security sandboxing, I think it would be a no brainer if there were not
a huge number of compatibility issues.

3. jRuby, Quercus and
Rhino all have very active development teams already so that wouldn't
change and other servers can integrate them without obscene amounts of
effort. Quercus is already installed with Railo, you just have to
manually add it in the Resin config file currently so adding a switch
in the admin to do that would be simple I suspect.

CFgroovy2
makes it easy to switch between the languages already so given it is
already done as a proof of concept I would not expect adding files to a
class path via admin toggles to be a full time job, perhaps Sean could
clarify?

You may have switched to Ruby, that's no doubt been
great for you, like when I switched from ASP & PHP to ColdFusion.
But for many Java developers who want fast scripting languages with the
ability to use elements of Java they love then Java based versions of
the scripting languages can be very advantageous especially when it
comes to working with and using legacy code.

I think you are
very wrong in being so dismissive of the idea just because in your
perception it wont suite you, think outside your box, there's plenty of
issues developers around the globe face and there is definitely
positive movement for change and having options to get past them. .NET
has JScript, VBScript, FSharp and CSharp because MS are smart enough to
know that some jobs are done better by different languages.

JavaScript
is the most important language for the web and is grow in popularity
rapidly (more Java/JavaScript servers than any other language now I
believe thanks to Rhino looking up SSJS on wikipedia), supporting Rhino
is a no brainer, support for actionscript could also potentially be
added as it is based on JavaScript.

More options is always
better who cares if there are some narrow minded users of a language
that stubornly refuse to investigate better options, Mono, Quercus,
jRuby all show that there is a need for languages to be implemented in
different ways for different needs. Bringing several of these into one
place would draw in more communities of developers to one place which
can only be a good thing as shown by Apache foundation itself!